Monday, June 10, 2013

The Motorist’s Luncheon

Slow Food,
1923

The Motorist’s
Luncheon Book, May E. Southworth’s delightful little volume, harkens to an
age before fast food chains edged the highways. Preparation for a road trip
required more than assembling a few water bottles and gassing up the SUV. She presents page after page of menus to ease
the hunger pangs of weary road warriors.

As Ms. Southworth says on page 1,

“In assembling your outfit it is
necessary that you have a wary eye on the ‘mess kit’ or you may find yourself,
like the Peri, perishing just outside the gates of some woodsy paradise. These
‘eats’ of the motorist are a life-saving necessity and have grown to be too
important a part of he equipment to be left to the hit-or-miss style of picking
up any old thing that happens to be in the house.

The design of this little book is
not recipes, but only an endeavor to lighten the burden of the one whose task
it is to cater to these joy hampers and fill them full, for who ever knew a
motorist to arrive except in a starving condition?”

Don’t leave
home without … gherkins?

In concluding her
introduction, she lists emergency supplies. Coffee, chocolate, cheese and
crackers all seem good to me—but canned pineapple, gherkins, and pancake flour?
She must have been quite the road-trip hostess!

Roadtrip
Menus

There are menus to be prepared on the campfire, and cold
picnics accompanied by hot beverages stored in a thermos, as well as cold
picnics with cold beverages. The “chafing dish” section offers menus that would
challenge this writer on the home stove, including, for example, chop suey with
rice, buttered rolls, pickled broccoli, hot Ceylon tea and eclairs. And then
there’s the chafing dish menu of Waldorf chicken, Dixie biscuits, sweet butter,
shredded halibut and slivers of red button radishes served on lettuce leaves
with mayonnaise, mocha cake, saline snowflakes, canned sliced peaches, scotch
short cakes, loganberry juice combined with Napa Soda, praline almonds and
salted pecan meats.

No-Meat
Fridays

For each section – campfire, thermos, cold, and chafing dish
– there is also a Friday section, featuring fish but no meat.

Girth
Control

Finally, from the nothing-new-under-the-sun department, the
back jacket cover includes an advertisement for another book also published by
Harper & Brothers:

To see the book itself, visit the
California Historical Society’s North Baker Research Library and ask for: May
E. Southworth, The Motorists’s Luncheon
Book. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923.

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